Opposing view: Judge gets it wrong on NSA

11:49 AM,
Dec. 20, 2013

Written by

Michael Chertoff

This past week two milestones were passed in the now long-running debate over the National Security Agency's data collection.

For the first time, NSA officials appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes" to provide unprecedented detail about the scope of the agency's intelligence collection. A day later, also for the first time, a federal district court judge barred continuation of the telephone billing record collection program, thus disagreeing with a number of judicial colleagues on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Judge Richard Leon's decision was based on a novel expansion of the ...